Others have pointed out what may he going wrong (drive locked due to Windows fast startup).

A slightly different tack - dual booting windows and linux on the same drive is a bad idea. One reason is the messy boot set up which can cause issues with windows not booting or linux not booting, or either/both fighting over the boot partition. It can get to the point of using repair disks to repair one or the other or both. It can be managed but make a mistake and its a real headache to fix (I say that as someone who has been their and done that and learned the lesson)

If you want to switch to linux but keep windows “just in case” and have a desktop I’d get a new SSD and use it as a dedicated linux drive. SATA or even better an m.2 card if your motherboard has the slots.

A separate drive is far better as linux can be the drive booted by the BIOS and then Grub can then point back to your untouched windows drive to boot it when you want. If linux updates it won’t affect windows, and if windows updates it won’t affect linux. Also if you have a drive failure you won’t lose 2 OSes and all data in one go.

Personally I have 5 drives in my PC - easy expansion of storage is a big benefit to a nice full size PC. I have one largely unused windows drive, and 4 ext4 drives.

I’m not sure this true - PDF is an open standard. The issue isn’t generally with layout and reproducibility - a good PDF maker and a good reader will give you an accurate representation of how it looks on all devices once the PDF is created.

Certainly there isn’t a dedicated FOSS tool for make PDFs; Libre Office and Inkscape do a decent job but not perfect which may be what you’re referring to. And they’re not dedicated PDF makers plus the real problem is building fillable forms and signature tools.

But there is a proprietary alternative called Master PDF that is a dedicated and supports all the PDF standard features I believe; one perpetual license is $80 compared to Adobe subscription based charging. I’m not aware of other options myself but they may exist. But it’s a viable alternative to the “adobe tax”.

Also of course if you have Office 365 from Microsoft, you can use Word to export docs to PDF reliably (in my experience). Obviously as far as you can get from FOSS, but it is an option on Linux via web browser if you have it from work for example; at least you don’t have to pay Adobe but it’s scraping the bottom of the barrel for this threat I know!

Firefox can do basic annotating, adding text and adding pictures but it can’t make a new PDF from scratch.

You may be confusing Adobe Acrobat Reader with Adobe Acrobat? Full Acrobat is the proprietary tool to make a PDF file from scratch including some of the more complex functions.

PDF is an open standard and has been for a while, so there are now plenty of alternatives for most of the functions. LibreOffice Draw and Inkscape can do a lot of PDF creation functions but not all. There are also “print to PDF” options to create basic PDF documents too.

However some of the more niche functions are not widely supported or well supported; and there isn’t really any opensource dedicated PDF maker that I’m aware of. Layout tools are abundant but I think it’s things like building forms and document signing that is less easily replicated. There is Master PDF - a fully functional PDF maker which is proprietary and available for Linux; it $80 for a perpetual license. I’m not aware of any other alternatives myself.

“Anyone” is a bit of a stretch. I think this is an example of how fragmented media and experience has become.

Selling millions of copies in impressive but there are billions of people in the world. And there is also new stuff being released all the time in the worlds of music, tv, film, books and gaming. All of this is jockeying for media attention and peoples attention.

These things were important to you as they were part of your formative years or had some emotional resonance., so it makes sense you are aware of them, but your lived experiences aren’t the same as others.

For example, I’m a gamer, I’ve heard to Trine but never played it.12,000 reviews on Steam is pretty impressive. But its a 16 year old game and when it comes to older games there are huge titles like Skyrim or GTAV that dominate attention still from that eraor earlier.

The Road to Perdition is a decent film but have a look at a list of Oscar winners - how many have you actually seen? The Oscars isn’t representative of films that were widely popular but rather films that were popular or important to people on Hollywood itself, or to the movie makers. It won one Oscar for cinematography.

And it grossed $180m - not bad but if you look a box office mojo the top 3 films in 2002 were Lord of the Rings 2 towers, Harry Potter and Spiderman. Road to Perdition was the 25th biggest film of the year, and bigger films includes Gangs of New York, Catch me if you can and Minority report. It was a decent film in a year of bigger films commerically.

As for Everclear, sorry to say I’ve never heard of them. Looking them up on wikipedia, they didn’t seem to troubled the charts outside the US and Canada, and for some reason New Zealand. And they did well in the Alt Music charts but they never broke the top 10 in the popular charts. So they are a bit niche even if they were popular in their own right and did well.

All of us have different things we love or were formative for us, and even the “mainstream” that gets the attention is still really only a fraction of what’s going on.

And I’d add the nature of taste and preference is so different that the stuff that gets big and crosses over into a mega hit is either generic/inoffensive commerical slop backed up with massive marketing or rarely so extraordinarily good that it spreads through word of mouth. There are so many gems out their like Trine or Everclear but most people will never come across them. Keep spreading the word about the things you love so others can enjoy them too.

The guy is ranting about a criminal investigation into why his polling numbers are so low. He’s quite literally a demented old man. I think he really isn’t rational enough to see that that he is harming the man he wants to win.

Second for The Rest is History. Its on all major podcast platforms and on YouTube. It has two hosts who take it in turns to talk about a topic while the other asks questions. Its full of gentle banter, and light humour but deleves in depth into topics. Some topics are covered in a single episode, others in depth in multi part series.

Its got a huge backlog of episodes, clearly labeled by topic and covers the full breadth of history. The two hosts are British but it covers global history, and it doesnt have biases. It does a “warts and all” approach to any topic.

Strongly recommend it.

The removal of the black gradient at the bottom is a plus.

Putting the controls in their own grey capsules so they still standout is a plus.

The moving of the volume button to the right is a negative.

I dont like change just for changes sake, but in fairness some of this is a good idea and a welcome design shift. I just hopebthey move the volume button back as having on the left with the main controls is pretty widespread and common design.

Debian has a good page on it and how their set up works:

https://wiki.debian.org/SecureBoot

Edit: Ubuntu is derived from Debian and then Mint from Ubuntu, but they may have a different approach.

If your linux OS supports secure boot then it does help improve security.

The differing opinions on it are often because it can cause issues in some set ups and in a default set up its only a marginal security gain.

It will add a layer of security at boot by preventing 3rd party unauthenticated processes / software from running and creates a secure boot chain from your BIOS up to the OS. But the default set up also means other authenticated OSes like Windows can be run, so its not as secure as it could be.

To really secure it you could create your own keys and then only your OS could boot. But as a linux newbie thats likely way more than you need and there are risks if you fuck up, to the point of accidentally locking you out of your own machine

So your choice is really just the default set up being on or off. On is a bit more secure but if you experience any issues then turn it off and don’t worry about it.

Its not doing nothing. Linux uses a Microsoft provided key for initial BIOS authentication and then has its own tree of keys that it uses for security. So it does have the benefits of locking out malicious code/processes even in a default set up.

Using your own secure boot and TPM keys is certainly more secure, but it doesnt follow that secure boot with the default set up is doing nothing to help secure your system at boot.

Linux supports secure boot so if a distro supports it it’s worth using it.

Linux can use a key signed by Microsoft in a preboot loader and then itself perform its own key authentications for all other processes and software (a shim), forming a secure chain from the BIOS up during boot. You dont have to play with creating your own keys.

So if your OS supports secure boot it is worth using it for added security at boot. Its far from perfect in this set up (as there are plenty of windows OS that also have permission to boot) but it is better than a free for all without it even if the risk is low for most desktop users.

You can go further and generate your own keys and use secure boot and TPM together to lock down the system further but you dont have to to get some benefits from secure boot.

As per your other thread, incase others are interested. I dont own one but on searching options seem to be limited. It can be jail broken and Kodi installed.

That may be a jumping off point for doing more but I can’t see that anyone has successfully installed linux on it for example.

https://github.com/NSSpiral/Blackb0x

So I dont own one but was interested in what could be done.

As far as I can see the 3rd gen model is less versatile than the 1st and 2nd, because its so locked down and has very limited storage. Its more like an iPhone than a PC.

However apparently it can be jailbroken and Kodi installed onto it: https://github.com/NSSpiral/Blackb0x

Jail breaking means “unlocking” the restrictions apple put on the is on the device so you can do more with it.

But this project is last updated in 2021 and from the looks of it online, fundamentally there isn’t much more that can be done. Jail breaking it would be a first step to do anything with it if you want to experiment.

Kodi would certainly give it a new lease of life but that still keeps it as a media consumption device. Kodi is an open source media tool that has a good TV friendly interface, and a huge range of plugins for streaming video and audio (legally but also illegally; kodi itself is perfectly legit and legal but there are plenty of plugins that essentially allow media piracy). You could then sell it on eBay if its working? Someone might want it even if only for cheap?

Other than that, recycle it? If your local refuse centre doesnt recycle it some companies might?

Travel Agents. I remember growing up they were all over the place and people had to go to them to book flights and hotels or buy package holidays.

They’re all but gone now. I’m vaguely aware there may still be some specialist ones left catering to elderly boomers?

Its an entire business and career path thats completely gone, replaced by websites and at a push generic call centres (some people still book over the phone I guess?)

Regardless of OS version? That sounds like nonsense. Only someone who doesn’t know how Linux works would believe that.

glibc is a fundamental library that underpins Linux. Its been going since the 1980s and is constantly updated and patched.

Similarly the Linux kernel undergoes constant evolution and change.

No one can promise to support Linux regardless of the OS version because by necessity it is constantly changing. Even slow release cycle distros like Debian move forward with each major release. Backwards compatibility is actually a bit of a nightmare on Linux. Ironically it can be easier to get old windows software running on Linux than old Linux software.

People running systems older than glibc 2.31 really should patch and update their systems. That package itself is already 5 years old.

Yeah I browsed r/all out of bored interest the other day for the first time in nearly 2 years. It was all shitty videos with silly music presumably imitating tik tok? I lasted a few minutes.

Then I browsed an old reddit I used to follow and it was mostly bot posts and karma farming.

I didn’t realise things have gotten as bad as they have.

No, if you like mint and cinnamon then why change?

The only reason to change would be if you want a different desktop environment. You could do that with mint or go with a distro that mains a different DE.

Mint is popular and reliable, so only change if you fancy trying something new and are willing to reinstall if its not to your liking.

I used to be on Mint and left it when I decided to move to KDE. It worked fine in mint but I had lots of app duplication in the menus. I also wanted more cutting edge versions.of software so wanted a different district for that. So I switched to OpenSuSE Tumbleweed (a rolling release distro).

If you do want to tinker and try out other distros then you could also play with distros in virtual machines (KVM or Virtualbox) or if you have a desktop get a second harddrive and install a different distro on it. Its easy to dualboot Linux distros (and safest to have separate hard drives so you don’t make mistakes when partitioning).

Yeah this is absolutely correct. When you look at prices and adjust for inflation $80 now is about right.

The value of money has gone down, and the value of pay cheques and salaries have not increased to keep up.

Unfortunately this often gets sidelined with “what aboutism” - like what about the dysfunctional AAA market, and predatory big publishers like EA that churn our crap, or all the publishers trying to build microtransactions into games. These are also ALL valid issues, but it doesn’t change the fundamentals that video games cost around $80 in 2000 when adjusted for inflation.

The video game industry can be dysfunctional AND we’re also being screwed over by dysfunctional unequal capitalism causing declining living standards at the same time.

Mine is about the same. Totally forgot it included by Steam Deck and my Index. Makes me feel a little better!

But then when i look at the number of unplayed and unfinished games in my library I feel bad again.

And then I feel worse remembering I also have a large GOG library which isn’t in that Steam spend and also lots of unplayed games…

And the company remains massively overvalued despite the recent falls in value. It has a long way to fall yet.